JEE (Main) 2021 will be held once a month, from February to May. Results will also be announced in four to five days to give candidates a window of about a week to apply for the following month’s test.
Amit Khare, secretary of the ministry of education, said: “The states have their own boards of education that take their exams between February and March. Due to the Covid situation, the Boards may reschedule their calendar. This is for the benefit of the students so that they have ample opportunity at their convenience. Also, tests like SAT, GRE or TOEFL are taken several times a year. This will be in line with international best practices. ”
Professor Abhay Karandikar, Director of IIT-Kanpur, said: “Doing it four times is a good step. NTA successfully conducted examinations even during the Covid era and the agency has the capacity to meet the challenges. This will ensure a fair opportunity and much greater flexibility for candidates. ”
However, some experts believe that multiple tests would increase students’ stress. Ashok Ganguly, educator and former president of CBSE, said: “Allowing the child to appear four times a year will not do any good. It will increase the burden on children who will continue to attend training classes to perform better next time and will hamper regular studies. It can also cause frustration. So two chances seem enough. ”
Some others also feel that multiple tests can dilute quality. A former IIT director said: “By taking the same exam so many times, the questions will be repeated as the syllabus is fixed, unlike TOEFL or GRE, where there is no fixed syllabus. Over a period of time, students will assault and score high. This will have an adverse effect on quality. ”
NTA, however, believes that the decision to conduct the review multiple times in a disaggregated manner is reasonable and appropriate in current times. “Between February and May, candidates will sit for Board exams or competitive exams. The training phase would be over by then. Also, it is not necessary for all candidates to appear on all four tests. In the current context, the situations in the states are different due to the pandemic and we do not know how or when the tests will be carried out. So candidates will have at least two opportunities to present themselves, ”said a member of the NTA’s governing body and an expert in psychometrics.
He said: “The assessment is decided based on the purpose of the exam, which is to see engineering aptitude and therefore it is not necessary that the role has to be difficult. JEE (Advanced) forces a student to go beyond the syllabus as their questions are at the undergraduate level and creates a clustering situation at the top. ”
With the inclusion of Punjabi, JEE (Main) will be conducted in 12 languages in 2021. “A very good step in giving all children the same opportunity to attempt a test in the language they are comfortable with. It will be a challenge (for NTA), but you have to rise to the occasion, ”said Anuradha Joshi, Director of Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi.
Ganguly, however, thinks that JEE (Main) should unlink from Advanced. “It is good that the government is committed to providing a level playing situation for students who have studied in a vernacular medium. But will students who have competed in vernacular medium be able to decipher JEE (Advanced) which is in English? Therefore, JEE (primary) must be re-designated ”
NTA believes that offering the test in vernacular languages will help more candidates improve their ranking, noting that in 2020, of the total 2.2 lakh candidates who qualified for the JEE (Advanced), 8,754 candidates were half vernacular.
Potential candidates welcome the initiative. Sumit Chakraborty from Kolkata said: “This is a good move. For example, elections are planned in West Bengal. So here candidates who may have difficulties can take the test in February, March or April. ”
Laxmi Rao from Visakhapatnam said: “Increasing the number of opportunities and offerings in my mother tongue will actually help me. I will not lose another year as I will be sure if I should go to engineering after testing myself two or three times. Also, I am studying at a high school in Telugu and sometimes we have trouble with English understanding certain questions. ”
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